Phantom Limb Pain
by Wolfychann
Summary: Ash, settling back into normal life after Army of Darkness, finds himself experiencing some changes... UPDATE: I can't finish this in five chapters, so I'm redoing my chapter naming scheme.
1. It's A Bitch

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Phantom Limb Pain

It's a bitch, truly it is, waking up out of a sound sleep with my right hand itching horribly. And then I try to scratch it, and I remember that, oh yeah, I don't_ have _a right hand. There've been times when I wanted to go dig up the bloody thing and scratch the bones, just to see if it would help. But the itch is just foreplay. Then… I can't describe it. It's worse than cutting off my hand in the first place, and all I can do is stick my stump in ice, grit my teeth, and wait for the pain to go away. People have gone insane from phantom limb pain. Lucky bastards.

The attacks used to happen more often; the first few weeks after I settled back into normal life without a hand, it was almost nightly. Lately it hasn't been nearly so bad; it only hits every couple of weeks. It's just that each time seems like forever. But hell, at least I get to park in the handicapped space.

The morning after a particularly bad attack, there was good news and bad news. The good news was that even though I'd barely slept, I was still able to stumble into S-Mart in time for my shift. The bad news was that I stumbled _into _S-Mart. I should have used the door. I looked around. Nobody had been watching, so I moved a big SALE poster over the cover the crack in the glass, stepped a few feet over to the actual door, and walked in.

Something seemed odd that day. People kept staring at me, out of the corners of their eyes, averting their gaze as soon as they saw me looking back. And a few little children saw me and ran, crying. Well, I know I can be kind of awful looking when I haven't got much sleep and my grooming routine's consisted of running my fingers through my hair a couple times on the drive to work. Still, crying seemed a bit much. And then I realized. My hand. I'd forgotten to put on my gauntlet hand before going to work. Crap.

Wait a minute. I'd driven to work. Since my old Delta 88 died its tragic death, I've driven a cruddy white Subaru Legacy station wagon. No personality, but it gets me around, it hauls a lot of crap, and it's got a nice wide backseat.

It's a stick shift.

Suddenly I didn't care what the customers thought. I pulled my sleeve up, exposing my stump. There were stubby nubs of bone sticking out of the skin, past the spot where I'd severed my hand two months before. They were white and shiny, slick with clear fluid, and they ached, but not badly. And they were... wiggling. I wasn't moving them.

Well, I didn't need that kind of trouble. I folded my sleeve carefully over the nubs and resolved to devote all my free time to pretending they didn't exist. See, if I didn't see them, and no one else saw them, then, logically, they weren't there.

That night, I dreamed that I was back in the cabin, in the woods. Something was coming after me, and I didn't know what it was. I just knew I had to get away from it. But as soon as I tried to run, I tripped and fell face first on the floor, and I couldn't move. Couldn't get up and flee, couldn't even turn over to see what was coming at me, just had to lie there with my face in the floorboards while this... something rushed toward me.

I woke up soaked with sweat, the phantom limb pain worse than ever. I staggered out of bed, filled my kitchen sink with ice water, and stuck my stump in it. My stump. Only as soon as I'd uncovered it, I realized it wasn't a stump any more. It was a hand. The hand was thin and motionless, pale skin hanging loosely on toothpick bones without any muscles or blood vessels or anything. But God did it hurt.

Well, I wasn't about to lop it off again. I'm not that stupid. I gritted my teeth, stuck my new hand in the ice water, and waited for it to stop hurting. It didn't. But something was changing in it, visibly changing. The fingers thickened and gained shape, muscles snaking out from my wrist and attaching themselves to the bones of the new hand. Blood vessels crawled along the backs of the muscles and embedded themselves in the tissue of the hand.

And then the pain grew, grew to agony, until I was choking down screams and I wasn't sure if I could take it any longer. My arm spasmed and knocked the ice out of the sink all over the floor. I fell to my knees on the icy linoleum. I might have blacked out for a moment, but I don't think so. I lay curled on my kitchen floor, and realized what this pain was. The nerves. Nerves were growing back into my hand, and while they were growing their ends were raw. Then the pain stopped, and I had two hands.

I looked at my right hand, stroked it, flexed the fingers. It was real, it seemed normal, and it was mine. Mine to move and mine to feel. Pretty damn cool. It was like having my right hand back. Okay, it _was _having my right hand back, but you know what I mean.

I crawled back into bed and slept like a baby the rest of the night. It wasn't just the end of the pain, or even the relief of having two hands again. I just felt... good. It was a warm content feeling in my muscles, like I'd just finished a great workout.

I woke up early the next morning. Usually I take about eight and a half hours of sleep to not be a zombie, but that night I hadn't slept more than three. But I felt great, absolutely bursting with energy, from the moment I hopped out of bed to the moment I tried to shave.

Because there was nothing there. I mean, I still had a face and all, but there was absolutely no stubble. I've usually got a five-o-clock shadow by noon and near to a full beard by the time I wake up in the morning, but all of a sudden my face was as smooth as a baby's ass. Weird. But what the hell, one less chore.

Two less chores, as it turned out. I went to the kitchen for breakfast, poured myself out a bowl of Corn Chex, and realized I wasn't hungry. But not in the ordinary way that happens when I've had a big dinner or my stomach hasn't woken up. I was so not-hungry that it was like I didn't even have a stomach. Like I'd never need to eat again.

I took a bite of the cereal anyway, because sometimes you need to eat a little to realize how hungry you really are. I couldn't swallow it. My throat just wouldn't work. I felt ridiculous, standing there in my kitchen with a mouthful of Corn Chex, just chewing it over and over and trying to make myself swallow and being completely unable. Eventually I just spat it out into the sink and threw out the rest of the cereal. You know, sometimes I get lonely, but it's times like that when I'm really grateful I don't live with anyone. No one around to see heap big Deadite slayer yarking into the garbage disposal.

After that things were normal again, and stayed normal for a whole eight minutes, which was how long it took me to get dressed. Then I realized that something else was odd. The world was blurry, and everything farther than a foot away seemed to smear into one big mass of color. I wondered if this was more magic, another strange effect of my new hand. Then I realized I'd forgotten to put in my contact lenses. Oh.

I went into the bathroom, got out my left contact lens, held it up to my left eye, and glanced into the mirror to get the lens in. It wasn't pleasant; I jabbed myself in the eye when I saw myself in the mirror. Because my eyes had no pupils. Or irises. If that's what the colored bit is called. Anyway, I didn't have them. Just white. I didn't think you could see without those parts, but then again I didn't think that hands grew back after you chopped them off, or that dead people woke up and ran around trying to bite you. Live and learn, huh?

Well, I was learning. But was I living? I mean, most of the people I've seen with all-white eyes have been Deadites. Okay, not most, more like all. The thing is, Deadites are sort of ... you know, dead. So I must have been dead. Shit. That was probably going to suck in a whole bunch of ways. How the hell do you get a date when you're dead? "Hey baby, wanna put the 'feel ya' in 'necrophilia'?"

See, that's stupid. There are no good pickup lines when you're dead!

Plus, there was the whole work thing. It was seven by then. I had to be at S-Mart at seven forty-five. It was a half-hour drive. So did I go? People had taken the missing-hand thing in stride, maybe they'd do the same for the white-eyes thing.

Or maybe not. I'd told my good friends at work the real reason why I'd lost my hand. But to the manager, I'd had to tell the story my lawyer gave me. Something about how a freak gas explosion in the cabin that killed all my friends and blew my hand off and how sometimes the post-traumatic stress whatever made me hallucinate and tell weird stories about zombies and medieval wars and stuff. Dumb story, but it was kind of handy as far as not being convicted of multiple rapes and murders and sent to jail for the rest of my life, so I guess I had to use it. I'm not sure which story my coworkers ended up believing.

You know that last sentence? It was bullshit. They think I'm crazy and I know it. Doesn't bug me; actually, it's kind of nice since they can't fire me or I can sue their asses for discriminating against a disabled person. Plus if someone ever pisses me off, I just look at them a certain way, get a peculiar look in my eyes, maybe mutter something about chainsaws... instant respect. Never fails.

What the hell, I'd go to work. Couldn't do any harm, and if I was dead that would just make it lamer to hang around my apartment doing nothing all day. Probably no one would even ask about my eyes. The only reason to stay home I could think of would be the stuff I could say when phoning in sick. "I'm sorry boss, I feel like the walking dead this morning." Yeah, I kill me.

I put the contacts in anyway. They cleared up my vision pretty well, even though they were just sitting on empty white eyes. I didn't even try to figure that one out.


	2. I Got To

I got to work too early, so no one was there but the night staff and the security guards. I was logging into my cash register in Housewares, when I realized there was only one other person in sight. Just this one girl, probably not more than sixteen, with long red hair and a real bitchy face, poking at the blenders with a certain air of not-actually-going-to-buy-anything.

I walked up to her, all ready to give her my snottiest "Can I help you with anything, ma'am?", when I realized something odd. I wanted to see her blood. Really wanted it. Maybe just a little drop of blood, but more would be better. I could picture it in my mind. It would be so red. So wet and warm and just a little bit sticky on my fingers. Blech. I shook my head and decided it would be better to just not talk to her.

That's what I decided, but it's not what I did. Instead, I walked up to the girl and touched her shoulder. I wanted to dig my nails in, to claw deep into the flesh of that shoulder. But I wasn't dumb enough to do it. I just sort of touched her, and she whirled around, gave me the evil eye, and got the hell away from me. No blood. Sad.

But then I started to worry. She was probably going to go and talk to the manager about the creepy employee who touched her. The last thing I needed was to give them an excuse to fire me. Especially since my chances for a new job were as slim as ever. It's hard to make a good impression on an interviewer when you have no pupils, you know?

So I caught up with the girl, and followed her from a distance. She didn't look for the manager, she just wandered aimlessly, with me always one aisle away. First to the CD rack to poke through and sniff haughtily at our cheesy pop selection, then to Sports to bounce all the basketballs, and finally to the jewelry counter. Most of the stuff out in the open was fake, but she went right for the gold. Well, the metaphorical gold; this is S-Mart I'm talking about. It was really only sterling silver, but it was still about sixty dollars worth of earrings, and she stuffed it all in her pocket and ran for the door.

I didn't yell "shoplifter" or set off an alarm. I just ran. I caught up with her outside the store, in the parking lot. And I had the perfect opportunity. There was no one around, I'd just caught her committing a crime, and if she got a little hurt it would just look like I'd been too enthusiastic in the pursuit of justice. I grabbed her by the shoulders, lifted her entirely off the ground, and dropped her.

She landed awkwardly, on her hands and knees, and the rough pavement cut her shins. 

"That hurt, you stupid fuckchop!" she swore at me, and bled. I took just a moment to look at that lovely red blood before dragging her back to give to the security guards. Just a moment. But it was nice and red. Just the way I'd pictured it.

I have a bad habit of talking to mirrors when I'm stressed. It's getting to be a really bad habit, because sometimes they talk back. Still, it usually helps. So as soon as I'd ditched the girl with the guards, I went to the men's room. It was empty. I faced down the two-handed, no-pupils guy in the mirror, and asked him if he was still Ash.

"Who are we, man? We just grew a new hand, and turned into a Deadite, and whomped some girl bloody for no good reason, and that's not really like us. Is it?"

I answered myself. "Hell yeah. She was shoplifting stuff. And look at you whining. Boo hoo, I got a new hand, waaah, I think I'll cry about it."

"But... but... Ashley, we're _dead_! Doesn't that bother us?"

"Nah. We're still walking around and stuff. That's not dead enough to matter."

"Wanting to hurt people matters."

"Hey, hey, don't get your panties in a twist. I'm not saying we should hurt people, just that we don't need to whinge about it. How about we actually use our brain for once, huh?"

I hate using my brain. That was okay, I didn't need to. Obviously, I already knew the answer, and was just baiting myself by pretending not to know. "Don't be cryptic with us. Just say it."

"Think; what gets rid of Deadites?"

"Uh, full bodily dismemberment. I think I could find a wood chipper, but..."

I rolled my eyes in contempt. But the fronts looked the same as the backs, so it didn't really show. "Okay, that's technically true. What gets rid of Deadites and isn't as messy?"

"I don't know! Just tell us already."

" Fine then. We're no fun. It's the book. Necronomicon ex Mortis. That damn book can do anything."

I wanted to slap myself. "That's our brilliant idea? That damn book burned up two months ago."

"Not all of it. That girl had some extra pages in a frame, remember? Some of the pages got thrown into 1300 AD, some of them got shredded. But some of them just got scattered."

I probably would have spent the rest of my shift in the bathroom, but right about then my buddy Ted walked in. He's a tall skinny guy with brown hair and big dorky glasses. We've known each other since before the whole mess with the Deadites; if there'd been space in the car he'd have gone up on the camping trip with me. I'm sure that's one coin flip he's never regretted losing. Anyway, he's one of probably two people who actually believed me about the Deadites, and considering that the other is my mom, Ted's a pretty cool guy.

"Hey Ted, we're past Back To School and the Christmas rush won't start for another couple of weeks. Perfect time to take some days off, you think?"

"I guess, why?" Ted turned and looked at me. "Oh my God! Your eyes, what happened to your eyes?"

I shrugged. "You remember how you were all pissed that Scotty called tails and you didn't get to go down to the cabin in Tennessee with us?"

"Are you answering a question with a question?"

"Am I?" I looked him right in the eyes, and he kind of shivered. "Ted, I think this is your chance to finally get to go see that cabin."

I explained all the crap that had been happening really quickly, and told him my plan; we'd go back down to that cabin, find what remained of the Necronomicon, and try and fix me.

After I was done, Ted shook his head. "Why do I have to be involved in this? Can't you just go down to the cabin yourself?"

"Yeah, but, you know, it'd be kind of creepy. Not that I've got a problem with that or anything. I just thought you might want to finally see it."

He laughed. "Hey, if you're afwaid of the big scawy monsters, I'll be glad to hold your hand while you cry for mommy."

"I'm not going to be half as scared as you are, buddy," I said. "It's just that I can't hold a shotgun _and_ a chainsaw at the same time."

"I dibs the chainsaw."

"Can't do that, I own it so I have infinite dibs."

"Fine. Look, I'll go with you to that cabin, but on one condition."

"What's that?" I asked.

"That you shut the hell up and let me pee already!"

We managed to get the next Monday and Tuesday off, which with the weekend gave us a healthy four days to drive from Michigan down to Tennessee. Waiting until then was a pain in the ass. Because being dead really sucks.

To begin with, I couldn't eat, like I said. I couldn't sleep, either. Like the eating, I didn't need it, but sitting around an empty apartment awake all night is just brain-meltingly boring. I couldn't even... well, I may have been dead, but I sure couldn't get any rigor mortis going, if you know what I mean. No food, no sleep, and no jerking off. There go my three main joys in life.

I couldn't even go out because then I might end up alone with someone, and that seemed to be a bad thing. This whole wanting-to-make-people-bleed thing was getting really annoying. I'm glad it was just for girls. I liked Ted as a friend, but I didn't really want to see his blood. So it would probably be safe for us to be alone together on the trip.

To make a short story really short, I watched a lot of television and didn't bludgeon any more helpless little shoplifters. Although I wanted to. 

Friday night, Ted and I loaded up my car. I didn't have anything to bring except for a couple changes of clothes. Well, and my chainsaw and shotgun, of course. And lots of gas and ammo, because sometimes weapons actually do have to be reloaded. And my old chemistry and engineering textbooks, because you just never know. And my CDs, because the radio stations in Tennessee suck.

The drive was pretty boring; since I didn't need to eat or sleep or anything, I just drove straight through the whole nine hours without a break. Ted mostly slept, waking up every now and then to eat Snickers bars and whine about my music. This from a guy who's said "I liked the Weird Al version better" in total seriousness.

Early Saturday morning we were in Morristown. I finally let Ted go to the bathroom, another thing I didn't have to do anymore, I sat with him and pretended to drink coffee while he ate breakfast, and then we got back in the car. From there we headed east on 11E, right on Kidwell Ridge Road, took another right on... yeah, that's enough information. I don't need anyone finding that place.

Not that there's much to find. When we got to the place where the cabin had been, there was nothing there but the stone chimney and some scattered ashes. It had burned to the ground.


	3. Let Me Get

"Let me get this straight," Ted said as I parked the car. "We're here to find three or four pieces of paper, with writing you can't read, last seen two months ago, conveniently located 'somewhere around here?'"

"That's about it, yeah. Come on, you knew what you were getting yourself into." I got out of the car and started walking around the place where the cabin had been. I could see the outlines of stone foundations outlining the ashes.

Ted walked up behind me, kicking little chunks of burnt wood around. "I thought we were going to a cabin with pages in it, not a hole in the ground with pages somewhere near it."

"A hole in the ground..." Something clicked in my head. Unfortunately, it was my jawbones. I'd been rotting a bit lately. "Ted, look for a trapdoor!"

"A trap..." Ted found the trapdoor. With his feet. Then his knees, then his butt, then his stomach. He caught the edge with his arms, but it crumbled, and he disappeared underground.

"Ted!" I ran over to the hole where the trapdoor had been. Not too close, though. The edges of the thing were looking pretty frayed, and I didn't see the sense in both of us falling in. "Ted, are you okay?"

"I think so," he yelled up from somewhere down in the darkness. "Just a little bruised." A pause, some shuffling sounds, and Ted yelled again. "Ash! There's something down here with me! There's something down here!" Then I heard a muffled scream, a long greasy slurp and an unsettling crunch.

I ran back to the car, jumped in, and slammed the door shut. I didn't start it. I couldn't drive away and leave Ted to die. It's just that I also couldn't make myself go down in that basement. Whatever was down there could hurt me, could destroy me. But I couldn't just abandon Ted. Shit. What the hell was I supposed to do?

Screw it. I'd lost enough friends. I got out of the car, grabbed the shotgun out of the trunk, loaded it, filled my pockets with shells, and headed down underground.

The basement stairs were mostly broken, so I just sort of scooted down the stairway on my butt. Down in the basement, it was too dark to see anything. I called out into the darkness. "Hey? Ted?"

No answer, what a shock. I shuffled forward, poking the shotgun into the darkness. I took a step, then another. My foot landed in something that went squish. I looked down, and that was a mistake. Not because of what was down there; it was just a mossy mud puddle. But as I dipped a finger in it just to make sure it wasn't something worse, I had that same feeling I'd had in my dream, the feeling that something was chasing me. 

It was coming for me, I couldn't see or hear or smell it but I could feel the rush of its motion, the quick jerky way it dashed through that dark basement. It roared under its breath and dove at me, it was almost at my back and I ran. I leapt up onto the stairway, grabbed it with my free hand, and felt the rotten wood crumble to damp dust under my fingers. I fell backwards, staggering but managing to keep my feet, knowing that whatever had been coming for me was there. Whatever it was that I'd been running from for so long, it had finally caught up with me. And yet, for a moment, nothing happened. It was quiet and almost peaceful. I stood in the beam of light coming from the broken trapdoor, shotgun at the ready, and waited.

A hand reached out from the darkness. It was Ted's hand, I could tell that somehow, but I could also tell it wasn't really Ted's hand anymore. Not the Ted I knew. And he--it, whatever--spoke. "Deeper, come deeper inside this black pit. Oh, Ashley, we have such things to show you."

I grinned at it, that cocky-bastard grin I only get when I'm scared off my ass. "I got something to show _you_, pal," I said and I jammed the shotgun where the thing's face ought to be. I couldn't think of a good follow-up line on the spot, so I just pulled the trigger. A shotgun blast makes a pretty nice punchline all on its own.

I heard it fire, and saw the flash, but it didn't seem like I was hitting anything. Then I got that rushing feeling again, and some kind of force grabbed me from behind and threw me forward. My feet scrabbled on the ground like a dog at the end of its leash, but it was no good. I was flying, speed unknown, destination unknown, through utter blackness.

I thought I'd hit a wall or stop or something pretty soon. I mean, a basement isn't that big. But I just kept going forward--and down. Somewhere along the way I dropped my shotgun. I didn't hear it hit the ground.

Just as suddenly as I'd started, or maybe a little more, I stopped. It was still dark, but there was a little light, enough for me to look around. I was in a cave, a huge underground cathedral of stone. I'm not being poetic. It was literally a cathedral, right down to the rows of pews, some of them with Deadites sitting in them. Right down to the coldy lit stained-glass windows, each one with a different scene of horror and destruction and cool stuff. Right down to the crucifix over the altar, with a living, writhing human being nailed to it.

It was Ted.


	4. Well, I Saw

Well, I saw how Ted's hand could've been beckoning to me. It was hacked off a bit above the wrist, pretty messily. Poor guy. I know what that's like, and it's not fun. Though it doesn't hurt as much as you'd think, you really just go numb after a second. On the other hand, I don't know what it's like to get big ugly nails driven through a wrist, an elbow on the side where there's no wrist to nail, and both ankles. Probably stings. Or maybe Ted was just being a big baby, the way he was all wide-eyed and screaming himself ragged.

Anyway, I don't like hearing people scream, it makes me nervous. So I ran as fast as I could away from him, to the front door of the cathedral, farthest from the altar. But then I screeched to a stop. The biggest Deadite I've ever seen was standing in front of it. Well, not counting the big tree thing it was the biggest. It was big enough that it filled the doorway completely with rancid yellow flesh full of tiny fatty bubbles. Every couple of seconds a bubble would pop, and a little yellow trail of fat would flow down the thing's skin. I did _not _want to push that out of the way, so I just stopped in front of it and stared. I may have gibbered.

It raised a thick hand and pointed toward Ted. I shook my head. "Uh-uh. Look, we're both Deadites here, you can just let me through, can't you... buddy?"

It shook its massive head, flinging drops of fat, and spoke in a deep gurgle. "Go to the altar." I just stood there wiping greasy crap off my face. "Go!"

When a thing like that tells you to do something, you get a certain inclination to obey. At least I did. I ran away from the thing, right up the center aisle of the cathedral, running so fast I didn't really notice that I was headed straight for Ted until I'd smacked clear into the altar.

Nailed up off-center like he was, Ted was crooked on the cross, his limbs bent up like a big pink crab already half eaten. He was still whimpering a bit, but not really full-out screaming anymore. I guess that was when I realized he was naked. Now, I'm not, you know, that way, not at _all_, I'd rather have a good woman than a hot meal, but the naked part still made everything just a little weirder.

Because now that I knew Ted was naked, I didn't feel quite right touching him, but I didn't want to get much farther away either, because suddenly we were surrounded by Deadites. I hopped on the altar next to Ted, clinging to his cross. Well, actually I started out clinging to him, but then I realized what I was doing and switched.

The Deadites tightened their ring, and more streamed in the cathedral doors, surrounding the altar completely with row after row of the shambling dead. They didn't attack. They started to chant. "Kill the boy. Kill the boy." Their voices were as dark and rotted as their faces, and it took me a moment to realize that they weren't talking about me, they were talking _to_ me. Oh.

"Hey, wait a minute here, Ted's a friend of mine, I can't just kill him."

The chanting stopped. One small Deadite, almost a skeleton but with a few wet parts still clinging to the bones, stepped forward, so close I could smell its stinking breath. "Our ancient legends tell of a man named Ashley, who became a great Deadite king. The old spirit that runs through the forests and dark bowers has seen you and knows you for the same man. And so we entreat you, Ashley, to perform the flesh sacrifice and retake the Charnel Crown."

I blinked. Something about being king maybe? That was cool. But something about a sacrifice. Probably not good.

"Forget it," I said. "Find yourself some other sucker, I'm outta here." I grabbed Ted and started to walk away with him. I guess I kind of forgot about the nails.

There was an awful ripping sound, and less blood than you'd think. Ted's upper body collapsed off the cross into my arms, his feet still nailed down. He didn't make any sounds worse than a gurgle, and I don't think he was all the way awake. I didn't know what to do. Pulling his feet off the cross would hurt him even worse, but I couldn't do anything with them still nailed on, and the feet were nailed up high enough that I couldn't even put Ted down. And even if I could've gotten him free, we were still surrounded by hundreds of Deadites. Just when I was starting to panic, Ted solved my problem handily. He died.

Once I saw he wasn't breathing, I didn't feel so bad about dropping him, even if his feet did tear messily off their nail. Anyway, I didn't stick around to pick up the pieces, but jumped off the altar into the crowd of Deadites.

They grabbed me, and I was smothered in them, covered in their rotting flesh until I couldn't see or smell anything else. But then they lifted me up, over their heads, and carried me the way football teams carry the guy who makes the winning touchdown. At least I guess that's what it's like. I was on the badminton team in high school, what do I know?

The dead things carried me out of the cathedral, out into a huge cavern. And when I say huge, I don't mean like airplane hangar huge, or even my ex-girlfriend's ass huge. I mean you could fit a small planet in that place huge. There were layers and layers of ledges, and ramps, and stairs, all leading down to an enormous circular floor at the bottom, where I was. It wasn't really well lit, but there were torches in all the nooks and crannies, so I could see things near the edges at least.

It wasn't really full of Deadites. There were a bunch of them, maybe a couple hundred, but the cavern was so big that a couple hundred wasn't anything at all. But they were all running towards me, or the crowd that was carrying me.

They carried me to the center of that big floor. There was a little rocky shrine-looking thing in the middle, and they set me down in front of it. I was too surrounded with Deadites to get away, so I looked at the shrine thing. There was a little door on the side of it. Something would probably bite me if I opened it. But I looked around, and saw about three hundred things that would definitely bite me if I didn't. Probably's better than definitely, so I went for it.

Nothing bit me. There were two things tucked inside the shrine. One was a sword. Kind of rusty, but a big-ass broadsword with decorations like blood vessels and a handle carved to look like a dragon's claw. Very nice. Call it Freudian, but there's something about having a big, thick, studly sword in my hand that just makes me happy. And this was as studly as swords get. I took it out of the shrine and gave it a few practice swings. The balance was perfect, and it was even bigger and sharper than it had looked inside the shrine. Oh God. This was better than sex. I brought the blade up to my face and licked it.

Around then I sort of noticed the several hundred people--Deadites, whatever--standing around staring at me while I made an ass of myself and got rust on my tongue. I put the sword down and held it behind my back sheepishly, then went to get the other thing from the shrine.

It was a crown carved from bone. Bones, actually, because it was made in several parts held together with some nasty-looking twine. The carving was amazing, with little coronets and crenellations and all kinds of frilly things all around. It was like frozen lace. Well, frozen, smelly lace. The bone still had bits of rotting flesh on it. But so what? _I _had bits of rotting flesh on myself. No reason to criticize the perfectly nice crown. Not sure what I was getting myself into, I put it on.

The same little skeleton guy who' d been lecturing me before stepped to the front of the crowd. "Hail, King Ashley!" he yelled.

The others joined in, until hundreds of Deadites were screaming in their decomposing voices. "Hail, King Ashley!"

I played with my sword a little and leaned back against the shrine. It was good to be the king.


	5. No, It Wasn't

No, it wasn't. It was absolutely worthless to be the king. Oh, they got me set up with this nicely decorated throne room and a throne made of still-living pieces of human flesh that still pulsed and bled with bits of life, but when you got down to it, I was a figurehead. Because none of the several hundred Deadites down in the cave actually had anything to do.

The little skeleton guy, who turned out to be named David, was my link to the Deadite world. He explained everything to me, and he passed my orders on to everyone. But what orders could I give? It wasn't like we needed to get food or drink or even worry about sanitation. We could just mill around underground forever. I would have been content to just do that, except for two things. Both of them were lust.

There was the lust for human blood and flesh. My Deadites had a constant hunger for people, or parts of people. Unfed, they were restless and grouchy, like kids on a car trip who've decided they're hungry just after passing the sign NEXT EXIT 50 MILES. Often, a Deadite would come in for an audience with me, and spend the whole time bitching and moaning about not having any people to hurt and really really wanting to hurt people. I started to feel bad about leaving all these poor little Deadites hungry. And I was getting a pretty bad jones for people meat myself.

The other lust was, as far as I knew, mine alone. I lusted for my body, for the feeling of being alive. It might have been short a hand, it might have had a bunch of scars on it, it might have had crappy vision and a weak knee, but it was home. Besides, the body I was in at the moment had some drawbacks of its own. I was really starting to miss food. And sex, and sleep. Even taking a crap was starting to be a nostalgic memory. Also, I was rotting. My joints creaked, a lot of my hair had fallen out, and my skin had turned a nasty shade of brown and become as fragile as a wet paper towel. I had bone showing in places. And as I spent days, or weeks, or years underground, with no way to tell time and nothing to do, I wanted to be human again.

I couldn't even go up to the surface, though. As creations of the _Naturan Demanto_, we were bound to its words; we could only walk upon the earth when someone living had heard the words in the book. As soon as everyone who had heard the words was dead, the Deadites were banished back underground. And nobody but me had heard the words, and I was dead and didn't count. And the book had been destroyed. Basically, we were fucked.

I don't know how long I stayed underground. I know that eventually I stopped rotting, and just sort of stayed in a gorpy sort of half-rotten state, so I couldn't even tell time by my decomposition. I know that I went around and talked to every Deadite around, and found that none of them were terribly good conversationalists. Braaaaiins this and swallow your soul that. Only about twenty could even put a sentence together, and they still didn't have much to say.

"So. Still dead?"

"Yup. You?"

"Same here."

I didn't completely just sit around being bored. I did my best to keep things interesting. I organized a basketball tournament! That didn't work out, though, because we didn't have basketballs, so we had to improvise. Turns out skulls don't bounce.

Soccer went pretty well, though I had to ban some of the less humanoid Deadites from playing or it wouldn't have worked. Sure, technically it's not use of hands if you pick the ball up with your tentacles, but I still don't call it fair play. The final result of the First All-Cave Round-Robin Tourney was a resounding 5-1 victory for the Hideous Horror Hags, with the Rotten Appleheads a distant second. Okay, so it wasn't really ordinary for me to be referee, tournament bookie, and center forward of the Hags all at the same time, but who was going to stop me? I was king. 

There wasn't anything to win anyway; all the bets were placed in bones and there's really only so many bones you can collect before you realize that bones aren't actually good for anything. I just ended up putting all my winnings in a big pile in the corner of my throne room and handing them out free to anyone who stopped by. Sometimes I'd chew on an arm bone, but all the bones we had around were pretty old and didn't have much flavor left in them.

Usually, though, I didn't play sports or anything. Usually I just sat in my throne, eyes closed, doing something that wasn't quite sleep but couldn't be waking. I couldn't sleep, and that was the curse, because I was stuck with my thoughts. I'm not much of a thinker normally. But with nothing to do but sit on that fleshy throne and stare at the closed door of my throne room, I thought, and it stung. I thought about what I was missing. I dreamt of greasy dinners at Denny's, of Linda's sweet tits, of the company of my old idiot friends. And then I'd open my eyes, and I'd still be alone and rotting in that quiet tomb of a throne room.

Things went on like that for a while. I didn't see the sun and I didn't sleep, so I have no idea how long. It had to be more than days, but it probably wasn't years.

Then someone read the words.


End file.
